“My mother the earth would harm you,” the woman said, “if I let her.”
The three fingernails of Crawford’s free hand had dug bloodily, into his palm, and he couldn’t tell whether the tears blurring his vision were his own or Shelley’s. Everything that had happened since his week of glad bondage to the lamia in Switzerland seemed like a frustrating dream. “Let her,” he said softly.
“How can I?” she asked. “I love you.”
He was dimly aware that Josephine’s hand was no longer in his.
The Don Juan was in the haze under the dark clouds when the wind struck, and she heeled wildly, her sails full of the hot damp breath of the storm; Crawford felt the pain as Shelley fell against the rail and clutched at it.
A little Italian boat, a felucca, was visible off the starboard bow, racing in for Livorno harbor, but she lowered her triangular lateen sails when she was near Shelley’s boat, and her captain called across the dark water, offering to take the Don Juan’s passengers aboard.
Crawford felt the strain in his own throat as Shelley yelled, “No!” The felucca was already receding aft, though Shelley had to look upward as well as back to see it from where he was crouched at the edge of the Don Juan’s slanted deck.
“Break the pentagram,” the silvery woman said, cringing against the weight of the sun on her, “and I will spare all of them—the children, that woman there—all of them. But do it now. Already I am so weakened that the task of saving Shelley will nearly kill me.”
“Let her go, Michael,” said Josephine suddenly. “You can’t kill his sister!”
Too, thought Crawford bitterly, you mean I can’t kill his sister too, in addition to your sister, is that it?
“Remember her promise to Shelley,” he said. His voice was as harsh as the cracking of the rocks and the rustling of the sand.
“You’re a woman too,” the lamia said to Josephine, “and you love him too. We’re alike, we’re identical, in that. I will let you have him—I’ll go away—if you will just let me save my brother. I don’t know why your Michael wants him to die.”
“He’s jealous of Shelley,” said Josephine, “because Shelley … had you here, a month ago.”
Crawford turned to Josephine to deny what she’d said, but the captain of the receding felucca had shouted, “If you will not come on board, for God’s sake reef your sails or you are lost!"—and Williams, his earlier resolve shattered by the real proximity of real death, had leaped for the halliards to lower the sails.
Shelley sprang forward and punched him away from the rail, and the Don Juan labored on through the steamy rain, still under full sail, farther into the storm.
Crawford saw Williams—no, it was Josephine—start toward the pentagram, her hand out to break the lines of it, and Crawford seized her by the arm and threw her away across the sand.
Human-shaped forms made of flinty sand were standing around them now, waving fingerless arms in impotent rage of grief, and trees on the slope behind him were snapping and falling as though the hill itself were waking up and throwing off its organic blanket. The sea bubbled like a boiling pot, and the sky was full of rushing, agitated spirits.
“Michael,” said the woman in the pentagram.
Helplessly he looked at her. Burns were visible now on her pearly skin. Horribly, love still shone in her unnatural eyes. No human, he thought, could have continued to love me through this.
“It is too late for me now,” she said. “I die today. Let me at least die going toward him, even though it is certain that I will die on the way.”
He knew that only someone who hated himself thoroughly could do this, could continue to do this, and he wondered if Josephine and Mary and her child would ever know enough to be thankful that one such had been chosen for the job.
“No,” he said.
The Don Juan had foundered now under the dark, turbulent sky; water was cascading in over the gunwales, and the tightly bellied sails were pulling her over still farther.
Shelley was clinging to the rail. “Goodbye, Aickman,” he said, having to spit out salt water before he could speak.
“Crawford,” said Crawford, suddenly thinking it was important. “My name is Michael Crawford.”
Crawford could feel the tension of Shelley’s smile as he held his head up into the warm rain above the solid water surging in over the gunwales. “Goodbye, Michael Crawford.”
“I could still release her,” Crawford heard himself say.
“No,” Shelley said, with a sort of desperately held serenity. “Stand with me.”
“Goodbye, Shelley,” Crawford managed to say.
He felt Shelley free one hand from the rail to wave.
Crawford caught a last thought of Shelley’s as the young poet despairingly lifted his feet and let go of the rail and let the savagely eager sea batter him off the deck: bleak gratitude that he had never learned to swim.
The hot sand was in Crawford’s mouth then, for he had fallen face down, gasping for air even though it wasn’t his lungs that were being choked with cold seawater.
In a minute or two his breathing returned to normal, and he was able to lift his sand-caked face.
The woman in the pentagram was impossibly shrinking, shrivelling in the harsh sunlight. She seemed more reptile than human now, and soon she was unmistakably a serpent, her bright scales glittering purple and gold. And as if to match the foggy tempest in which the Don Juan had met its doom, the shaking hill had thrown up a cloud of dust, and a savage wind sprang up in which the sand-figures flung themselves apart in clouds of stinging, gritty spray.
With filming eyes the diminished creature gave him a last glance full of love and torment, and then there was just a little statue lying in the center of the pentagram. The wind died, and he was alone on the beach with Josephine, who was sitting in the sand where he had thrown her, rubbing her arm.
Crawford felt unpleasantly drunk, out of touch with the world. Throwing my women around, he thought, as he bent to pick up the little statue; he drew his arm back and flung it as far as he could out over the water of the Gulf. It seemed to hang in the sky, turning slowly, for a long time before it finally sped downward and made a brief, small splash and was gone.
All the cubic miles of hot air seemed to stagger, as if a vast but subsonic chord had been struck on some cosmic organ.
Josephine had stood up by the time he turned back from the sea, and she gave him a frail, bewildered smile. “We did it,” she said, her voice quiet but pitched higher than usual. “We planned it and we did it. I even thought I had some idea of what it was we were going to do. Now I—” She shook her head, and though she was smiling he thought she might cry. “I don’t have any idea what it is that we’ve done.”
Crawford went to her and gently took the arm by which he had flung her away a minute earlier. He knew what to say, and he tried to give the sentence a tone of importance. “We saved Mary, and her son—and helped to save Jane Williams and her children.”
Josephine’s lips were slightly parted, and she was squinting around at the sea and the sand and the rocks. The haze of dust from the hill had blown away out over the sea.
“An enormity,” she said. “I’ll never grasp all of what we did, but it was an enormity.”